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The Boy in the Bands is a record of the passing thoughts of Scott Wells: keeping an eye on the Unitarian Universalist Association, suggesting church administration hacks, and adding his bit for sustainable living in Washington, D.C. (I'm proud of my employer and colleagues, but the opinions here are mine.)

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Technology I’m not following

I’ve been an advocate for pushing Unitarian Universalists in technology for more than a decade now, going back to the use of Gopher and mailing lists, through the web, to PDAs and blogs, and now wikis and who-knows-what. A bunch of us did: Unitarian Universalists are relatively early-acquirers of new technology, so I write on, keeping the pulse as much or more than suggesting anything new.

That said, I’m not that much of a wonk. I don’t have a cell phone, PDA (lost one, another stolen) or an MP3 player (also lost) – I don’t even have a watch. I use a paper calendar for the most part. I’m going back and looking at how established technologies — say, spreadsheet applications — can be pressed into more service. So I need to drop some projects: they just don’t pay. These are:

The use of XML to re-purpose data by web and print publications. I’ll wait to see how the Bible markup language projects make out first.

The use of TeX/LaTeX for print publications. Too esoteric for most, and those who are interested can learn it easily enough.

Greenstone Digital Libraries. An interesting way to get libraries on a CD out, but good internet access will reduce its usefulness (better still for its core demographic in the developing world) and I just can’t get the publisher side to work. Maybe when version three comes out.

OCR. Optical Character Recognition is still too crude, even after all these years. I’d make better use of my time making image-based PDFs and learning to type faster!